Earlier this year I contributed a guest post at Copyblogger on the fact that copywriters need to understand data. Their editors had a little fun with my headline (they threw in the “get out of the business” bit) but they have a point. Copywriters who aren’t data driven may soon find demand for their skills fade.
Today I was thinking a bit more about fluency in data and I think it’s even broader. Basically, in any facet of marketing, media or PR data is everyone’s domain. The fact that you can now easily get feedback on your activities, to not do so is to ignore a powerful mechanism to improve.
What I think is especially funny (or concerning) is that people still think digital is hard to measure. I always almost fall out of my chair when I hear that. Digital is easier to measure, you just need to understand what metrics matter and have the right tools setup at the start.
Let me throw some questions at you:
- What have you done to improve your website conversions this month?
- Do you even know what % of your website visitors convert to sale or lead?
- Which of your online marketing tactics provided the most return last month?
- What was your most successful piece of content created last month? How do you know?
- How many (and how effective) were the organic shares of your blog content last month?
Did you know all the answers? If yes, awesome, you’re probably an analytics Jedi (go make friends with Avinash if you aren’t already). If no (or someone on your team doesn’t know) you should bring them up to speed.
There are too many potential tactics and ideas you could implement digitally. It is actually what you don’t do that defines your digital marketing success. And data is the key to understand what’s working and what’s not.
You can’t consistently improve results or be at all strategic in your marketing and PR if you don’t know what’s producing, (and why) how to report results meaningfully to make a case for more budget and iterate/refine.